(Take A) Walk on the High Line: Aestheticizing Power, Politics, and Ecology in (Neoliberal) Urban OpenSpace

Joern Langhorst (University of Colorado, Denver)

The High Line in New York City is a prime example of designed urban public space and key location to explore the dynamic relationships between spatial conditions, socio-cultural processes, and attendant geometries of power. This paper critically interrogates the agency and instrumentality of public urban open space in encouraging/enabling or discouraging/suppressing democratic processes, actions and behaviors against the background of classical and contemporary perspectives on the relationship of the spatial- material and socio-cultural, foregrounding issues of social and environmental justice (e.g. Lefebvre 1996, Mitchell 2003). The High Line is conceivably the most iconic public park project in recent years, illuminates how conflicts over neoliberal agendas of urban redevelopment are spatialized, and how emergent, constructed and transgressive ecologies are instrumentalized in the “urban renewal” and neoliberal rebranding of neighborhoods and cities as “resilient”, “sustainable” or “eco-cities”.

It deploys its carefully constructed aesthetics to successfully hide the actual authorship of space and to 'naturalize' hegemonial power through the replacement of the ecologically transgressive and the exclusion and displacement of the socially transgressive. The erasure of physical expression of previous “layers” replaces the possibility of encountering more authentic and inclusive versions and vision of urban nature and culture with its reductive, domesticated “hyper-real” artifact (Baudrillard 1981; Langhorst 2014).

This artifact reinforces and expands existing power differentials while excluding ideas about the relationship between human and non-human processes that might challenge the hegemony of global capital flows in imagining alternative versions of urbanity and urban development. As such, its agency is primarily as a highly valued aesthetic object and device, a powerful sign that represents, advertises and “mediates” neoliberal versions of urban renewal, a “spectacle” (Debord 1967). The High Line illustrates how particular spatial-material constructions of “public space” tend to enforce particular “publics” and social identities, producing and reproducing specific attitudes and behaviors. The “publics” on the High Line are limited to consciously or unconsciously enact expressions of contemporary constructions of urbanity scripted into the space, rendering it in effect a stage and camouflaging who writes the script for this “performance ofaesthetics”, inviting questions of “aesthetic justice” (Mattila 2002) in the context of rights to the city.

The High Line compellingly illustrates the essential and often underestimated role of aesthetic-visual practices and regimes inherent in - and materialized by - designed urban spaces. These territorialize and deterritorialize loci and processes of memory, meaning, place and community identity. In the context of urban renewal, abject gentrification and wholesale displacement of communities, the role of urban space itself as medium cannot be underestimated. Spectacular urban renewal projects in disenfranchised, “transitional” neighborhoods are instrumental in accelerating and depoliticizing these processes and the highly contested spaces themselves, and play an increasing role the “branding” of cities (Langhorst 2015). The role of public open space, due to its ability of being inhabited, used and interacted with in different ways, and its (at least perceivably) more open access, is much more insidious, often becoming an instrument of rendering politics invisible, opposing Marcuse’s (2009) practices of “exposing, proposing and politicizing”.